


oh my god, before my eyes, the earth is scattering

by OpalPulsar



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, How Do I Tag This, entity collapse au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 23:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17590910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalPulsar/pseuds/OpalPulsar
Summary: the rain of tears can't stop this; the world is torn apart





	oh my god, before my eyes, the earth is scattering

The first sign that something was wrong wasn’t the stars, oh, no, not at all. The first sign that something was wrong wasn’t how they all vanished, slowly, Trial after Trial, one by one. It wasn’t how the Entity’s realm slowly became darker and darker and darker, until the survivors relied on burning sticks to see outside the Campfire, and even those Killers who were adjusted to the dark had trouble seeing the survivors. Oh, no, there were so many little details and signs before that--but the stars disappearing from the sky was the sign that let them know something was going horribly wrong.

Trials slowly became less a rush of hunting and survival, and more a place to talk among the abstract put-togethers of what once were spaces in the real world. There was no more point in doing Trials “properly”, after all, not when the Entity’s rewards trickled off into nothingness, and her punishments didn’t exist anymore. In the final moments between stability and collapse, when the false stars in the sky began to leave them, the Killers put aside their weapons, the Survivors put aside their fear, they sat down, and they began to learn about each other. In the spaces between waiting at the campfire or roaming the realms, in times that were once meant to be pain and death and fear, they stopped. They listened. And, most importantly, they learned.

They learned, from all the signs, the fading exit gates, the not-quite-working generators, the lack of anything even resembling the Entity’s influence, from, most importantly, the stars fading out of the sky, they learned that the realm they’d been stuck in for eternities on end was dying. They could do nothing. They could only wait--wait, and hope.

They talked, and told the others about each other, what their lives were like before they were pulled into the Entity’s realm. They told each other of how they remembered their old worlds to be like, what they did in their free time, what they were hoping to do in the future, who they left behind. They talked of the little things, too; how they remembered the smell of rain, the dewdrops upon grass in the morning, how the remembered the world to be like, all life and change and real things--not a fake imitation made by something dying, something that just wanted to take and feed, to prolong its lifespan just a bit longer.

And when the last star left the sky, leaving the people in empty silence--the people, because there had long since stopped to be any real distinction between survivor and killer, because, despite everything, they were alike in more ways than they weren’t--when the last star left the sky, it was like something had just stopped watching. When even the darkness began to fade, when the realm began to burn around them, they knew their time had come.

When the realm began to burn around them, like embers and ash in the wind, and openings began to tear themselves loose, some of them hesitated. Some of them stopped, paused, had the word “No” on their lips. Why wouldn’t they? They didn’t know what was out there, where they were going. Some of them had lost everything, everything, while they were in the Entity’s realm, and this was the only thing they had left. 

In another story, maybe they would have been left behind. In another place, maybe they would have burned, died, their lives forgotten and lost to a place not even time itself could touch, and the only ones who would remember them would be the ones that saw them die.

In another world, perhaps--but not this one. Never this one, not after everything the people had gone through together. In this one, after the last star faded out of the sky and the Entity died, slowly, the Killers were convinced by soft words, by tugs on shirts and shoves toward the exists, their only escape while the world burned around them. In this one, the Survivors were told, in no uncertain words, “Go--I’ll follow,” and pulled towards their freedom. In this world, the people who had befriended each other across a crumbling gap they were never meant to cross looked at each other and said “I wouldn’t give you up for anything. Go. I love you.”

In this one, everybody who was worth saving survived, and when they looked up at the sky, the stars looked down at them and said **You’re finally free.**

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a prompt thing I'm doing with my friends! Please read the other fics in the collection, they're all so good.


End file.
